As almost-forgotten books or teachers reappear clearly before my eyes, demanding inclusion in the main list, where they would surely further dilute the present scarcely discernible structure, I trick them by shunting them into this annex....Kins Collins.
My 8th-grade algebra teacher, Mrs. Delaney. She seemed to appreciate my quickness in grasping new concepts and in using them. We never spoke privately, but I felt a bond between us (age 13).
10th-grade history textbook, section on ancient Greek culture. I thought that if these very intelligent Greeks had such ridiculous beliefs about gods, which were so obviously false, then maybe ALL societies' religious beliefs are false, arising merely out of each society's irrational needs. (What, indeed, would Socrates or Aristotle think of Christianity?) I have never since deviated from this view (age 15).
Compare with R. B. Jones' view. Or with John Stuart Mill's.Kinsey Report on male sexuality (age 17). So that's what we do!
Professor Patz's lectures on "Early Renaissance architecture, sculpture, and painting". Brunelleschi, Brunelleschi, Brunelleschi! (Univ. of Heidelberg, age 32).
Calculus, by Leonard Gillman and Robert H. McDowell. I had to take a course in calculus as part of the requirements for a "certificate" in computer programming. This was the textbook. I was immensely pleased to see how in thirty years the quality and rigor of such books had greatly increased, if Gillman can be viewed as being representative. In Gillman the concepts were now clearer, the presentation more deductive, quasi-axiomatic -- altogether a delightful book to learn from (age 47). At the University of Chicago we had used R. Courant, Differential and Integral Calculus, I & II, which I am measuring Gillman against, not a bad book for the time.
A Course in Linear Algebra, by David B. Damiano and John B. Little. The first book that opened my eyes to genuine higher mathematics. It was the abstractness of the objects dealt with that I found so intoxicating: vector spaces of differentiable functions, indeed! (Age 59.) At Chicago when I was 17 I took a course with Paul Halmos that covered much of the same material as this book, but perhaps -- at the advanced age of 59! -- my mathematical maturity had reached a sufficient level -- talk about late-developers -- for me to grasp what had always been there for the taking.
Some other candidates for this annex page. As with all the books I mention, the ones listed below are not just books I happened to read, but ones that had a lasting influence on my thoughts or behavior. (Authors, titles, and contents are as usual just from memory.) Included also are some works of music that had a particularly strong effect on my psyche.
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D e t r o i t | ||
| A. Frederick Collins, | How to Become an Inventor. | |
| [Unknown], | High school physics textbook [parts only]. | |
| Cmdr. Edward Ellsberg, | Diving for Sunken Treasure ("On the Bottom"?). | |
| Willy Ley, | Rockets. | |
| Don P. Caverly, | A Primer of Electronics. | |
| Pierre Auger, | What Are Cosmic Rays? | |
| H. D. Smyth, | Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. | |
| Donald Wollheim (ed.), | The Pocket Book of Science Fiction . | |
| Jules Verne, |
A Journey to the Center of the Earth. From the Earth to the Moon. Around the Moon. | |
| H. G. Wells, |
The Time Machine. The Complete Short Stories. War of the Worlds. The First Men in the Moon. The Invisible Man. The Island of Doctor Moreau. Food of the Gods. The Science of Life (with Julian Huxley & G.P.Wells). An Experiment in Autobiography. | |
| Groff Conklin (ed.), | The Best of Science Fiction. | |
| W. B. Mann, | The Cyclotron. | |
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C h i c a g o | ||
| Ruth Benedict, | Patterns of Culture. | |
| William James, | The Varieties of Religious Experience. | |
| Hans Reichenbach, | Elements of Symbolic Logic. | |
| Meade & Hitch, | An Introduction to Economic Analysis and Policy. | |
| Sinclair Lewis, | Arrowsmith. Main Street. It Can't happen Here. | |
| Erwin Schrödinger, | What Is Life? | |
| Virginia Woolf, | To the Lighthouse. | |
| Ludwig van Beethoven, |
String Quartet #15 a minor (Budapest String Quartet), String Quartet #14 c# minor. | |
| Bela Bartok, |
String Quartet #3 (Julliard String Quartet), String Quartet #4, String Quartet #5. Hungarian Folk Music (Oxford University Press, 1931). | |
| Richard Wagner, |
Tristan und Isolde
(Metropolitan Opera House broadcast). | |
| Otto Fenichel, | The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. | |
| J. S. Bach, | Six Sonatas and Suites for Unaccompanied Violin (Alexander Schneider). | |
| Harry Schwartz, | Russia's Soviet Economy. | |
| Lynn Thorndike, | The History of Medieval Europe. | |
| Eileen Power, | Medieval People. | |
| C. P. Fitzgerald, | Revolution in China. China: A Short Cultural History. | |
| H. D. Lasswell, | Politics: Who Gets What, When and How. | |
| Johan Huizinga, | The Waning of the Middle Ages. | |
| James Westfall Thompson, | Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages (300-1300). | |
| J. S. Bach, | St. Matthew Passion (Hermann Scherchen). | |
| Thompson, Palm, & Van Nostrand, | European Civilization: A Political, Social and Cultural History, Vol. 1. | |
| Henri Pirenne, | Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. | |
| Max Cary, | A History of Rome. | |
| H. H. Scullard, | Roman Politics, 220-150 B.C.. | |
| S. A. Cook (ed.), et al, | The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. X, "Augustus" (F. E. Adcock?). | |
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H e i d e l b e r g | ||
| Julius Caesar, | De Bello Gallico. | |
| Adelle Davis, | Let's Eat Right To Keep Fit. | |
| Hans Reichenbach, | The Rise of Scientific Philosophy. | |
| Gottlob Frege, | Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik. | |
| Rudolf Carnap, | "The Methodological Character of Theoretical Concepts" (1956). | |
| Bertrand Russell, | History of Western Philosophy. Autobiography, Vol. 1. | |
| Sigmund Freud, | Letters to His Fiancee. Five Case-Studies of Hysteria. On Jokes. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Three Studies in Infant Sexuality. Future of an Illusion. Totem and Tabu. Moses and Monotheism. And many other papers -- all read in German. | |
| Adelle Davis, | Let's Get Well. | |
| Edward Yourdon, | Techniques of Program Structure and Design. | |
| Niklaus Wirth, | "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement". | |
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S i l i c o n V a l l e y | ||
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| Jane Austen, |
Pride and Prejudice. Sense and Sensibility. |
re- cent |
| Mark Twain, | A Tramp Abroad. | |
| James Joyce, | Dubliners. | |
| E. M. Forster, |
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| Joseph Conrad, |
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| Richard M. Weaver, | Ideas Have Consequences. | |
| Allan Bloom, | The Closing of the American Mind. | |
| I. F. Stone, | The Trial of Socrates. | |
| Mortimer J. Adler, | Aristotle For Everybody. Six Great Ideas. | |
| A. E. Taylor, | Socrates: The Man and His Thought. The Mind of Plato. Aristotle. | |
| Thucydides, | History of the Peloponnesian War. | |
| Plato, |
Apology of Socrates. Crito. The Republic. |
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| Aristotle, |
Poetics.
Rhetoric. Posterior Analytics. |
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| Plutarch, | The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. | |
| Agnes Savill, | Alexander the Great and His Time. | |
| Edith Hamilton, | The Greek Way. | |
| Will Durant, | The Story of Philosophy. | |
| H. G. Wells, | The Outline of History (Part 1). | |
| Jared Diamond, | Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. | |
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| James Reston, Jr., | Galileo. | |
| Laura Fermi & Gilberto Bernardini, |
Galileo and the Scientific Revolution. | |
| John Stuart Mill, | The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill. | |
| Tad Wise, | Tesla: a Novel. | |
| Albert Einstein & Leopold Infeld, |
The Evolution of Physics. | |
| Albert Einstein, | Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (1916). | |
| Banesh Hoffmann, | Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel. | |
| W. V. Quine, | The Time of My Life: An Autobiography. | |
| Richard Feynman, |
The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist. The Character of Physical Law. |
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| Stephen Hawking, | A Brief History of Time. Black Holes and Baby Universes. | |
| Richard Morris, | The Universe, the Eleventh Dimension, and Everything. | |
| Timothy Ferris, | Coming of Age in the Milky Way. | |
| Freeman Dyson, | The Sun, the Genome, & the Internet. | |
| Scott McCartney, | ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer. | |
| W. Daniel Hillis, | The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. | |
| Stephen Jay Gould, | Evolution & Extinction. | |
| Carl Sagan, | Life in the Universe: Essays. | |
| Steven Pinker, | How the Mind Works. [Pinker has it right!] | |
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| Robert S. Norris, | Racing For the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, The Manhattan Project's Indispensable Man. | |
| Henry D. Smyth, | Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. | |
| Robert Jungk, | Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists. [Apology for the German scientists who worked on the Bomb for Hitler] | |
| Jeremy Bernstein, | Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hill. | |
| Malcolm C. MacPherson, | Time Bomb: Fermi, Heisenberg, and the Race for the Atomic Bomb. | |
| Dan Cooper, | Enrico Fermi: And the Revolutions of Modern Physics. | |
| Emilio Segrè, | Enrico Fermi: Physicist. | |
| Gregg Herken, | Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. | |
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| Marshall Kirk McKusick, et al, | The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System. | |
| Apple Developer Connection, | Inside Cocoa: Object-Oriented Programming and the Objective-C Language. | |
| Andrew M. Duncan, | Objective-C Pocket Reference. | |
| Stephen G. Kochan, | Programming in Objective-C: A complete introduction to the Objective-C language. | |
| Apple Computer, | Learning Cocoa, 1st ed. | |
| James D. Davidson & Apple Computer, | Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd ed. | |
| Erick Tejkowski, | Cocoa Programming for Dummies. | |
| Simson Garfinkel & Michael K. Mahoney, | Building Cocoa Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide. | |
| Michael Beam & James D. Davidson, | Cocoa in a Nutshell. | |
| Bill Cheeseman, | Cocoa Recipies for Mac OS X. | |
| Aaron Hillegass, | Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, 2nd Ed. | |
| Scott Anguish, Erik M. Buck, & Don Yacktman, | Cocoa Programming. | |
| Apple documentation staff, | Cocoa Fundamentals Guide. | |
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| John W. Dean, | Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. | |
| Ron Suskind, | The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill. | |
| Richard A. Clarke, | Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror. | |
| Joseph Wilson, | The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity. | |
| James Bamford, | A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies. | |
| Craig R. Eisendrath & Melvin A. Goodman, |
Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk. | |
| Anonymous [Michael F. Scheuer], | Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. | |
| Kitty Kelley, | The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. | |
| Seymour Hersh, | Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. | |
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D V D s |
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| John Else, | The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer & the Atomic Bomb. | |
| Michael Moore, | Fahrenheit 9/11. | |
| Robert Greenwald, | Uncovered: The whole truth about the Iraq war. | |
| George Butler, | Going Upriver: The long war of John Kerry. | |
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| Jeremy Adams, | Neolithic Europe. | |
| Bob Brier, | History of Ancient Egypt. | |
| Elizabeth Vandiver, |
Classical Mythology. The 'Iliad' of Homer. The 'Odyssey' of Homer. Greek Tragedy. |
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| Jeremy McInerney, |
Ancient Greek Civilization. Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age. |
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| J. Rufus Fears, | Famous Greeks. | |
| David Roochnik, | An Introduction to Greek Philosophy. | |
| Michael Sugrue, | The Dialogs of Plato. | |
| Daniel N. Robinson, | The Great Ideas of Philosophy. | |
| Garrett G. Fagan, | History of Ancient Rome. | |
| Darren Staloff, | The Search for a Meaningful Past: Philosophies, Theories, and Interpretations of Human History. | |
| Darren Staloff & Michael Sugrue, |
Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition. | |
| Arnold Weinstein, S. Georgia Nugent, & Michael Sugrue, | Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition. | |
| Arnold Weinstein, | Understanding Literature and Life: Drama, Poetry, and Narrative. | |
| Louis Markos, | From Plato to Postmodernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature & the Role of the Author. | |
| Peter Saccio, | Shakespeare: The Word and the Action. | |
| Robert Greenberg, |
Bach and the High Baroque. The Symphonies of Beethoven. |
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| Alan Kors, | Birth of the Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries. | |
| Dennis Dalton, | Power Over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory. | |
| Thomas Childers, |
Europe and Western Civilization in the Modern Age. History of Hitler's Empire. |
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| John R. Searle, | The Philosophy of Mind. | |
| Richard Wolfson, | Einstein's Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists. | |
| Timothy Taylor, |
Economics. Legacy of the Great Economists. History of the U.S. Economy in the 20th Century. |
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| Robert Henricks, | The Religions of China. | |
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